Tablet market gets saturated; no incentive to buy a new one

After recent reports that the PC market was showing signs of life (and beating the customary “PCs are dead” predictions that have been with us for decades), new data show that the tablet market is more or less tapped out.

Ars Technica has a great editorial up, discussing exactly that fact, and I agree 100% with it. Here’s a snippet to get you started:

With their initial explosive growth, tablets were welcomed by manufacturers as the next smartphone: nice expensive gadgets that you could sell to people every couple of years. And for a short time, that’s what they looked like. While prices weren’t smartphone high, they weren’t bad for devices that were simple enough to design and build.
And then…
We were discussing at the Orbiting HQ what it would take to prompt our tablet owners to upgrade or replace their tablets, generally a mix of the last couple of generations of iPad. The consensus was “a lot.” Screen resolution, at least on existing “retina” devices, is as good as it needs to be. Battery life is at the level of “good enough.” Shaving a bit of weight off is nice, especially for the non-Air owners, but not so nice as to justify buying a whole new tablet. It’s not like any of them are heavy. Fast processors? What for?

I am an owner of an ASUS Transformer Pad TF300t, and I really don’t feel the need to get something new. It runs on NVIDIA’s Tegra 3, which is powerful enough for anything you can throw at it, and happily runs a CyanogenMOD 11 ROM at the moment, with Android version 4.4.4. There is absolutely no reason for me to even consider getting a new tablet – and I bet there are a lot of people who feel that way.